Mothman Apologia

Winner of the 2021 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize

available March 22, 2022
Yale University Press

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Praise for Mothman Apologia:

“As a reader, I was often surprised, even engrossed, and never once bored! How often can you say that?”
—Rae Armantrout, prize judge

“Every smooth, mercurial ode has an underlying melancholy texture. Every crisp Robert Wood Lynn sentence carries music.”
—Terrance Hayes, author of Lighthead

“Capacious at every turn, Mothman Apologia, in its folkloric sensibilities, is its own rapture of language and conflagration of song.”
—Major Jackson, author of The Absurd Man

“More tour de force than debut, this extraordinarily powerful collection smolders, a slow burn.”
—Deborah Landau, author of Soft Targets

“With grace and a grave, meditative intensity, Robert Wood Lynn’s poems bloom with elegies and omens. This is a daring, compassionate debut.”
—R.A. Villanueva, author of Reliquaria

Robert Wood Lynn’s collection of poems explores the tensions of youth and the saturation points of knowledge: those moments when the acquisition of understanding overlaps with regret and becomes a desire to know less.

These are narrative poems of love and grief, built from a storytelling tradition. Taken together they form an arc encompassing the experience of growing up, looking away, and looking back.

This collection was selected by renowned poet Rae Armantrout to become the 116th volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets.

Earlier winners of the prize include such noted poets as Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery, and Richard Siken.

Cover photograph by Roger May.